September 27, 2025 - It's the day after Valentine's day. Snow is falling in big fluffy flakes, and I’ve just fallen flat on my ass outside Ari, Aidan, and Ava’s apartment. A couple walks by; one of them just did the exact same thing around the corner, and we have that instantaneous and brief snow day connection while laughing it off— it’s really coming down! It’s a wasteland out here! Be careful, get home safe! I make it around the back of the building where the entrance to the stairwell is propped open with a brick, push open the door, and promptly fall down into the basement. This is decidedly less funny.
Up three flights of stairs is the living room where a supergroup of friends and I are playing acoustic sets tonight. Off the stairwell in the smoke room, people are catching up and drawing in chalk on the wall. It’s mostly cupid’s arrow hearts: R+C, A+Y, carved lovingly into the bark. Eventually everyone starts to settle down in front of the couch while Lucy sets up. Soon there’s barely space to make your way to an open pocket with all of us packed in like sardines. People keep trying to open up the windows further but they’re making awkward reaches, knocking around candles on the windowsills; multiple near-misses of hair and fire related disaster follow. Heads pop out of the kitchen when we run out of floor. Everyone in the room has complimented Sammy’s hat.
Each one of us are in bands or front bands or love bands that are, by all standards, loud as fuck. Getting to hear, truly hear, your friends sing for the first time is like infinite little kisses on the forehead.
I muse on this until I’m doused with slush by a passing car. On the train ride home I sit next to two identical couples, each consisting of a normal guy and his gorgeous goth girlfriend. Happy Valentine’s Day.
July 13th. The last time I saw KO Queen I broke my glasses in the pit.
I was born on September 1st, Allston Christmas. That is to say I've never had a normal Boston birthday. Every year I've been moving myself or someone else, running up and down flights of stairs with boxes and desks, loading trucks and trying to keep the cat inside. At one point I resented this. But this year, I was out, for good, on the 25th of August. A pink chair that had been a staple of my apartments for the past three years went back to the street from which it came, to another loving host. I couldn't help but feel left out when my birthday came around. The chaos! The mutual upheaval, exhaustion, renewal in a new place! It's an unusual thing to feel yourself moving (literally) inexplicably alongside what feels like an entire city. It's one of my favorite things about Boston and tragically one reason why it is so hard to plant roots there. It is a city mired in transition and consequently most people see it as transitory-- not to mention that landlords treat this shift as a given and jack up rent beyond human comprehension.
Time moves fast and energy wanes. Load in load out load in load out drink PBRs like water. And every once in a while, everyone moves together for the same purpose, a hand grazing your cheek in affection, saying I’m here and you’re here and it wouldn’t be the same without us. We’re all in love, packed exponentially beyond fire code into apartments with an open flame. I watch 15-year-old videos of bands in the same rooms I know inside and out now, read stories from Ohio in the 90s, and feel like I could cry at the mirror, everything lost to time and everything built in its memory. People are always making music, they’ll always find ways to play it. In every scene there are kernels of familiarity. But the people you run into, the places you go, the sidewalks, the subways, the corporate ponds, the supermarkets and stupid giant Citgo signs make everything special, everything significant. Nothing will ever be quite like this, right here, right now. We’ve already been here in another lifetime. We’re another coil in the spiral, and everything is new again. So yeah I guess you can find love at O’Brien’s.